Winnetka Bowling League

Matthew Koma grew up in Long Island, New York and was consistently surrounded by music from an early age. He played in bands with his brother for years before eventually moving out to Los Angeles ten years ago to pursue music more seriously. He began writing and producing for other artists, but wasn’t sure what he wanted his own sound to be. While working on an album for Interscope, he was hooked up with a few electronic producers and took “a weird left turn”. He spent a few years in that region of the music world before eventually making the concrete decision to focus on something new. And thus, Winnetka Bowling League was born.

Winnetka Bowling League was never a side project, and Matthew never wanted to approach it as such. “I put a hard stop to the [electronic] stuff,” he says. His main goal with the music he was writing was for it to feel good to him, because he had spent so much time making music that didn’t necessarily hit that bar. “I was really jealous of artists who you would hear their story and it was like, ‘Yeah, I was just doing what I was doing and it started resonating with people.’ I felt like I never got to do that,” he says.

Matthew spent six months demoing songs that he had collected over the years, but didn’t feel like any of them were different enough from what he was known for to be considered a definitive change. Then he wrote “On The 5” – which served as Winnetka Bowling League’s first single. “It sort of straddled the line of being song-driven, which is definitely the foundation I come from, but sonically I felt was a little different from where I’ve been,” he says. That’s when the lightbulb went off.

Winnetka Bowling League’s first, self-titled EP was built around “On The 5” and was released in September. Despite Matthew’s success elsewhere in the music world, WBL serves as a completely separate project, with most fans being new listeners and not necessarily people that have followed Matthew’s entire career. “Proof being, I put out a song with The Midnight Kids recently and so many of the kids listening to it are like, ‘Matt’s back! He hasn’t put out music in over a year!’” he laughs, “It’s such a separate world, and I’m grateful for that, to be honest. It’s humble beginnings and starting from ground zero.” This allows Matthew to really project a true representation of himself and his music out into the world, without preconceived notions based on his past releases. “It definitely feels like the first step of the latter,” he says.

Going into a new project with an arsenal of knowledge has made the experience “a lot more fun” for Matthew. “From years of doing it and years of seeing certain kinds of successes, it’s almost a self-lesson,” he says, “All you really have is a process. What happens outside of that box is regardless of you.” Over the years, he’s learned that so much of what he once thought he could control – like what songs resonate the most with listeners – are out of his control, which has been a freeing realization. “I’m so grateful to just get on stage and play shows,” he says, “They may be way smaller shows than what I was playing, but they resonate in such a different way that I’ve never been happier.”

The band played two shows in New York and Los Angeles in October, and will head out on the road with Mother Mother starting January 12th. Past that, the band will release their second EP in the spring and promises to be on the road a lot more throughout 2019. “It’s a true restart. We’ve played two shows but I’m so hungry to play more,” Matthew says. Being used to full record releases growing up, the single-driven culture that is dictated by the electronic and hip-hop worlds was at first foreign to Matthew, but he’s beginning to see the benefit of having a constant stream of music coming out. “I think songs raise their hands when they’re supposed to and collections raise their hands when they’re supposed to,” he says. That being said, an album is a goal, but Matthew doesn’t see albums as “this big important thing” anymore. He writes a lot, and he’s having so much fun writing for this band, that his main priority is to keep putting music out.

Words & Photos by CATHERINE POWELL